A photograph featuring a group of Mrs Dorries’s friends, including Mrs Elson, wearing eveningwear and drinking wine was posted on the MP’s official website until earlier this year.

Following an earlier Daily Telegraph report on the MP’s payments of parliamentary expenses to Mrs Elson’s company, the picture was removed.

Mrs Elson’s company, Marketing Management (Midlands) Ltd, is based in her house in a small village in the Cotswolds. Accounts filed in August 2009 showed it had assets worth £4,527.

The house is yards away from a tiny lodge-keeper’s cottage that Mrs Dorries tells the Parliamentary authorities is her “main home” for expenses purposes.

The unusual arrangement allows the MP to claim thousands of pounds in “second home” allowances for her much larger constituency farmhouse.

MPs are entitled to claim up to £17,500 a year to cover the cost of a second home “required for the performance of the Member’s parliamentary functions”.

Most have a constituency house and a flat in London. Mrs Dorries’s designated “main home”, however, is 90 miles from Parliament and 55 miles from her constituency.

MPs are supposed to designate as their second home the property where they stay least often. Neighbours have previously alleged that Mrs Dorries spent most of her time at her constituency house.

Mrs Dorries’s allowance claims are currently under investigation by John Lyon, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards.

The MP - who has also employed two of her daughters at taxpayers' expense - is believed to have first designated the Cotswolds lodge-keeper’s cottage as her “main home” only around the start of this year.

It is not known what property she designated as her “main home” between moving out of her marital home in Chipping Campden, Gloucs, in January 2007, and this point.

Mr Lyon is holding inquiries into several MPs whose expenses claims were detailed by the Daily Telegraph during its investigation last year.

However he is unable to complete any because a new Standards and Privileges Committee, the group of MPs that oversees his work, has still not been appointed.

Mrs Dorries was yesterday elected to the Commons Health Select Committee. She sat on the Science and Technology Committee between October 2009 and May 2010. According to a report on its website she did not attend any of its sittings.